A Childs History of England

by Charles Dickens

His noble air, and dignified endurance of distress, so touched
the Roman people who thronged the streets to see him, that he and his
family were restored to freedom. No one knows whether his great heart
broke, and he died in Rome, or whether he ever returned to his own dear
country. English oaks have grown up from acorns, and withered away, when
they were hundreds of years old--and other oaks have sprung up in their
places, and died too, very aged--since the rest of the history of the
brave CARACTACUS was forgotten.

Still, the Britons _would not_ yield. They rose again and again, and
died by thousands, sword in hand. They rose, on every possible occasion.
SUETONIUS, another Roman general, came, and stormed the Island of
Anglesey (then called MONA), which was supposed to be sacred, and he
burnt the Druids in their own wicker cages, by their own fires. But,
even while he was in Britain, with his victorious troops, the BRITONS
rose. Because BOADICEA, a British queen, the widow of the King of the
Norfolk and Suffolk people, resisted the plundering of her property by
the Romans who were settled in England, she was scourged, by order of
CATUS a Roman officer; and her two daughters were shamefully insulted in
her presence, and her husband's relations were made slaves. To avenge
this injury, the Britons rose, with all their might and rage. They drove
CATUS into Gaul; they laid the Roman possessions waste; they forced the
Romans out of London, then a poor little town, but a trading place; they
hanged, burnt, crucified, and slew by the sword, seventy thousand Romans
in a few days. SUETONIUS strengthened his army, and advanced to give
them battle. They strengthened their army, and desperately attacked his,
on the field where it was strongly posted. Before the first charge of
the Britons was made, BOADICEA, in a war-chariot, with her fair hair
streaming in the wind, and her injured daughters lying at her feet, drove
among the troops, and cried to them for vengeance on their oppressors,
the licentious Romans. The Britons fought to the last; but they were
vanquished with great slaughter, and the unhappy queen took poison.

Still, the spirit of the Britons was not broken. When SUETONIUS left the
country, they fell upon his troops, and retook the Island of Anglesey.
AGRICOLA came, fifteen or twenty years afterwards, and retook it once
more, and devoted seven years to subduing the country, especially that
part of it which is now called SCOTLAND; but, its people, the
Caledonians, resisted him at every inch of ground. They fought the
bloodiest battles with him; they killed their very wives and children, to
prevent his making prisoners of them; they fell, fighting, in such great
numbers that certain hills in Scotland are yet supposed to be vast heaps
of stones piled up above their graves. HADRIAN came, thirty years
afterwards, and still they resisted him. SEVERUS came, nearly a hundred
years afterwards, and they worried his great army like dogs, and rejoiced
to see them die, by thousands, in the bogs and swamps. CARACALLA, the
son and successor of SEVERUS, did the most to conquer them, for a time;
but not by force of arms. He knew how little that would do. He yielded
up a quantity of land to the Caledonians, and gave the Britons the same
privileges as the Romans possessed. There was peace, after this, for
seventy years.